...and degrees, government, rites and ceremonies, music, the army, law, political geography, national defense. In 1273 it was supplemented by Ma Duanlin’s enormous and highly regarded Wenxian tongkao (“General Study of the Literary Remains”), which included a good bibliography. Supplements to this work were published in the 17th, 18th, and 20th centuries. Under......

official and statesman in the last years of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911/12), who took a lead in promoting Western studies, reforming the Chinese government, and introducing Western technology into China....

...(“Literary Selections”) by Xiaotong (sometimes called Zhaoming Wenxuan to distinguish it from other similarly named anthologies) and of Wenxin Diaolong (“The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons”; a classic in literary criticism) by Liu Xie, the evolution of what has come to be known as the Six Dynasties essay......

...(“field and garden”) scenes depicted by Tao Qian, his countryman and contemporary. Indeed, Xie’s poems outnumber those of other Six Dynasties poets in the Wenxuan (“Literary Anthology”), the 6th-century canon that defined later Chinese literary tastes....

...their attention to the overhauling of literary traditions, beginning with the language itself. In January 1917 an article by Hu Shih, a student of philosophy at Columbia University, entitled “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” (“Tentative Proposal for Literary Reform”) was published in Xinqingnian (New Youth), a radical monthly magazine published in Beijing.......

...to pool their resources and promote shared ideals by forming literary associations. In 1920 Shen Yanbin, better known later as Mao Dun, and others established the Wenxue Yanjiuhui (“Literary Research Association”), generally referred to as the “realist” or “art-for-life’s-sake” school, which assumed the editorship of the established literary......

Han Chinese developed more polysyllabic words and more specific verbal and nominal (noun) categories of words. Most traces of verb formation and verb conjugation began to disappear. An independent Southern tradition (on the Yangtze River), simultaneous with Late Archaic Chinese, developed a special style, used in the poetry Chuci (“Elegies of Chu”), which......

German king and, as Wenceslas IV, king of Bohemia, whose weak and tempestuous, though eventful, reign was continually plagued by wars and princely rivalries that he was unable to control, plunging his territories into a state of virtual anarchy until he was stripped of his powers altogether by a rebellious nobility....

Austrian state chancellor during the eventful decades from the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) to the beginning of the coalition wars against revolutionary France (1792). Kaunitz was responsible for the foreign policy of the Habsburg monarchy, and he served as principal adviser on foreign affairs to the empress Maria Theresa and to her successors....

Liechtenstein Alpine skier who was the first athlete from her country to win an Olympic medal, earning a bronze at the 1976 Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria. She went on to win two gold medals and a silver at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, U.S., matching Rosi Mittermaier’s record for the most successful Olympic Alpine skiing perfomance by a woman....

German king and king of Bohemia (as Charles) from 1346 to 1378 and Holy Roman emperor from 1355 to 1378, one of the most learned and diplomatically skillful sovereigns of his time. He gained more through diplomacy than others did by war, and through purchases, marriages, and inheritance he enlarged his dynastic power. Under Charles’s rule Prague became the political, economic, and cultural centre—...

Chinese scholar-reformer who, as minister to the Song emperor Renzong (reigned 1022/23–1063/64), anticipated many of the reforms of the great innovator Wang Anshi (1021–86). In his 10-point program raised in 1043, Fan attempted to abolish nepotism and corruption, reclaim unused land, equalize landholdings, create a strong local militia system, reduce the labou...

city and port, southeastern Zhejiang sheng (province), southeastern China. It is situated on the south bank of the Ou River, some 19 miles (30 km) from its mouth. The estuary of the Ou River is much obstructed by small islands and mudbanks, but the port is accessible by ships of up to about 1,000 tons. The Ou long provid...

...work and produced a long series of masters, including Johann Georg Übelherr and Joseph Anton Feuchtmayer, whose masterpieces are the Rococo figures at Birnau on Lake Constance. The sculptor Christian Wenzinger worked at Freiburg im Breisgau in relative isolation, but his softly modelled figures have a delicacy that recalls the paintings of Boucher....

reign name (nianhao) of the seventh emperor of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty (1644–1911/12) of China. During his reign (1850–61) China was beset internally by the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) and externally by conflicts with the encroaching European powers....

temple name (miaohao) of the 15th emperor (reigned 827–840) of the Tang dynasty (618–907) of China. He attempted unsuccessfully to free the court from the influence of the palace eunuchs, who had usurped much of the imperial power. His carefully laid plots against the eunuchs all misfired, resulting in the Sweet Dew Incident of 835, in whi...

city, seat (1834) of Huntington county, central Indiana, U.S. It is located on the Little Wabash River, near its juncture with the Wabash, 24 miles (39 km) southwest of Fort Wayne. The original site (Forks of the Wabash) was a Miami village (home of the Miami chief Jean Baptiste Richardville and his successor, Francis La Fontaine), where many treaties with Native Americans were signed; it was know...

Jack the Rapper (Jack Gibson) helped open the first African-American-owned radio station in the United States, WERD in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1949. Gibson learned about radio while working as a gofer for deejay Al Benson in Chicago. He learned even more while at WERD, where he discovered that a white disc jockey received twice the amount of payola (in the form of “consulting fees”)......

...that are now the West Frisian Islands. From about 400 ce these low-lying sandflats were inhabited by the Frisians, who in the face of rising sea levels built the first seaworks—dikes and terpen (or werden), mounds to which they retreated during periods of high water. The volume of these terpen ranks them among the great engineering works of humankind....

Nathan Söderblom, in his prolific scholarly career, devised several classifications other than the principal one discussed above. In his great work on primitive religions, Das Werden des Gottesglaubens (“Development of the Belief in God”), Söderblom divided religions into dynamistic, animistic, and theistic types according to the way primitive peoples......

Hereditary motor neuropathies (also known as spinal muscular atrophies and as Werdnig-Hoffman or Kugelberg-Welander diseases) are a diverse group of genetic disorders in which signs of ventral-horn disease occur in babies or young people. The usual symptoms of muscle atrophy and weakness progress more slowly if the disease begins at a later age (5 to 15 years); at later ages the disease may......

...for The Way to Love (1933), a passable musical comedy that was again set in Paris; Ann Dvorak played his love interest. Taurog stayed in that genre for We’re Not Dressing (1934), which was one of his best efforts at Paramount. It starred Bing Crosby as a sailor who takes charge of a group of shipwrecked socialites (Carole Lombard and Merman,......

...of the 1950s were comedies. Mister 880 (1950) starred Burt Lancaster as a treasury agent on the trail of a benign elderly counterfeiter (Edmund Gwenn), and We’re Not Married (1952) was a Nunnally Johnson-penned concoction about five couples who discover that their wedding ceremonies were not performed legally; the cast included Eve Arden, Fred.....

...influence on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released the following year. By way of wry acknowledgment, the cover of the Mothers’ third album, We’re Only in It for the Money (1968), parodied that of Sgt. Pepper’s, just as the music challenged the Beatles’ visions of love and beauty with the deliberate “ugliness”......

...Bounty Hunter (2010), The Switch (2010), Just Go with It (2011), and Wanderlust (2012). In We’re the Millers (2013), she portrayed an exotic dancer who poses as a mother in a scheme to smuggle marijuana from Mexico into the United States. She appeared as a kidnapping victim in the......

The central theme of the Olmec religion was a pantheon of deities each of which usually was a hybrid between jaguar and human infant, often crying or snarling with open mouth. This “were-jaguar” is the hallmark of Olmec art, and it was the unity of objects in this style that first suggested to scholars that they were dealing with a new and previously unknown civilization. There is......

(Old English: “man payment”), in ancient Germanic law, the amount of compensation paid by a person committing an offense to the injured party or, in case of death, to his family. In certain instances part of the wergild was paid to the king and to the lord—these having lost, respectively, a subject and a vassal. The wergild was at first informal but was later regulated by law....

in European folklore, a man who turns into a wolf at night and devours animals, people, or corpses but returns to human form by day. Some werewolves change shape at will; others, in whom the condition is hereditary or acquired by having been bitten by a werewolf, change shape involuntarily, under the influence of a full moon. If he is wounded in wolf form, the wounds will show in his human form a...

...Nonetheless, some of his works won awards, including Siny fonar (1991; The Blue Lantern and Other Stories) and Problema vervolka v sredney polose (1994; A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories, also published as The Sacred Book of the Werewolf), both of which won a Russian Booker Prize. Not only were his...

...(1976), several songs from which were covered by Linda Ronstadt. That album was followed by Excitable Boy (1978), which featured the rollicking Werewolves of London—Zevon’s only major hit—as well as the geopolitically inspired songs Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner and Lawyers,......

...of little value in the dispute, for there the continental Bunter Formation rests unconformably on Upper Permian strata of the Zechstein basin. The marine equivalent of the Bunter in the Alps is the Werfen Limestone; there the distinctive Lower Triassic bivalve genus Claraia is found in apparently conformable contact with the underlying Bellerophon Limestone, in which undisputed Permian.....

Norway’s great national poet, symbol of Norway’s independence, whose humanitarian activity, revolutionary ideas, and love of freedom made him a legendary figure. The clash between his faction (the “patriots”) and the pro-Danish “intelligentsia” led by Johan Welhaven marked the beginning of an ideological conflict that persisted throughout the century....

novelist and passionate advocate of women’s rights; she wrote the first Norwegian novel dealing critically with the position of women. Its immense influence on later writers—especially Henrik Ibsen, Jonas Lie, and Alexander Kielland—is reflected in the late 19th century, when women’s emancipation became a burning topic of the day....

(Old English: “man payment”), in ancient Germanic law, the amount of compensation paid by a person committing an offense to the injured party or, in case of death, to his family. In certain instances part of the wergild was paid to the king and to the lord—these having lost, respectively, a subject and a vassal. The wergild was at first informal but was later regulated by law....

(Old English: “man payment”), in ancient Germanic law, the amount of compensation paid by a person committing an offense to the injured party or, in case of death, to his family. In certain instances part of the wergild was paid to the king and to the lord—these having lost, respectively, a subject and a vassal. The wergild was at first informal but was later regulated by law....

...children. Together they governed the duchies more liberally than did most other princes in Italy, though some authorities suggest that this resulted more from weakness of character than from policy. Josef von Werklein, however, who became secretary of state in Parma after Neipperg’s death (1829), pursued a more reactionary policy, and in 1831 a rebellion in Parma forced the duchess to take......

...was not, however, a Kantian himself. The physicist and logician Charles Sanders Peirce owes his pragmatism largely to Kant’s role as a counterweight against Hegelianism. The American philosopher William H. Werkmeister represented a type of Neo-Kantianism inspired by the Marburg school (The Basis and Structure of Knowledge, 1948)....

...was a class for motorcycles in many of the old town-to-town automobile road races, the Paris-Vienna race, for example. The de Dion tricycle dominated the sport in 1897, but two-wheelers like the Werner soon set the stage for an entirely different form of racing. In 1904 the Fédération Internationale du Motocyclisme (renamed the Fédération Internationale......

German geologist who founded the Neptunist school, which proclaimed the aqueous origin of all rocks, in opposition to the Plutonists, or Vulcanists, who argued that granite and many other rocks were of igneous origin. Werner rejected uniformitarianism (belief that geological evolution has been a uniform and continuous process)....

...the suppression of all his works. After his release he produced the tragedy Richard Savage (1839), the first in a series of well-constructed and effective plays. His domestic tragedy Werner oder Herz und Welt (1840; “Werner or Heart and World”) long remained in the repertory of the German theatres. Gutzkow also wrote Das Urbild des Tartüffe (1844;......

In a futuristic town, Guy Montag (played by Oskar Werner) works as a fireman but with an ironic twist: his job is to create bonfires of books, which have been banned. Montag is content with his life until several encounters lead him to hide books himself and, eventually, become a fugitive from the state. These encounters include meeting a young, attractive freethinker, Clarisse (Julie......

Dec. 29, 1913near Lille, FranceJune 24, 2002LuxembourgLuxembourgian politician who , was hailed as the “father of the euro”; he used his position as prime minister of Luxembourg from 1959 to 1974 and again from 1979 to 1984 to lead the campaign for a single European currency, which he dubbe...

May 15, 1907Berlin, Ger.July 7, 2000BerlinGerman-born Soviet espionage agent and writer who , was a committed communist who operated as a spy for the Soviet Union in China, Nazi Germany, Switzerland, and England beginning in about 1930. Using the code name Sonya, she gathered and transmitte...

any of several rare human disorders associated with premature aging. The two major types of progeria are Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome, which has its onset in early childhood, and Werner syndrome (or adult progeria), which occurs later in life. A third condition, Hallerman-Streiff-François syndrome, is characterized by the presence of progeria in combination with dwarfism and other......

German-born French mathematician awarded a Fields Medal in 2006 “for his contributions to the development of stochastic Loewner evolution, the geometry of two-dimensional Brownian motion, and conformal theory.”...

...meionite, a calcium aluminosilicate, are the theoretical end-members (pure compounds); they have been synthesized but occur in nature only with at least 20 percent substitution of one for the other. Wernerite (the former group name) has been used for members of intermediate composition between marialite and meionite. For chemical formulae and detailed physical properties, see feldspathoi...

Sept. 18, 1923Kirkcaldy, Fifeshire, Scot.April 28, 2007Ottawa, Ont.Canadian jurist who reached the pinnacle of her profession in 1982, when she was appointed the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court of Canada, a post she held until her retirement in 1991. Wilson graduated with an M.A....

Damage to the temporal lobe may result in a language disorder known as Wernicke aphasia. An individual with Wernicke aphasia has difficulty understanding language; speech is typically fluent but is empty of content and characterized by circumlocutions, a high incidence of vague words like “thing,” and sometimes neologisms and senseless “word salad.”...

region of the brain that contains motor neurons involved in the comprehension of speech. This area was first described in 1874 by German neurologist Carl Wernicke. The Wernicke area is located in the posterior third of the upper temporal convolution of the left hemisphere of the brain. Thus, it lies close to the auditory c...

German neurologist who related nerve diseases to specific areas of the brain. He is best known for his descriptions of the aphasias, disorders interfering with the ability to communicate in speech or writing....

Prolonged drinking that interferes with an adequate diet may lead to Wernicke disease, which results from an acute complete deficiency of thiamin (vitamin B1) and is marked by a clouding of consciousness and abnormal eye movements. It also can lead to Korsakoff syndrome, marked by irreversible loss of recent memory, with a tendency to make up for the defect by confabulation, the......

Prolonged drinking that interferes with an adequate diet may lead to Wernicke disease, which results from an acute complete deficiency of thiamin (vitamin B1) and is marked by a clouding of consciousness and abnormal eye movements. It also can lead to Korsakoff syndrome, marked by irreversible loss of recent memory, with a tendency to make up for the defect by confabulation, the......

Vitamin A deficiency primarily affects the retinas and skin, but components of the vitamin B group are essential for normal development and functioning of the nervous system. Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (common in alcoholics) results from a thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency and consists of eye movement disorders, cerebellar incoordination, memory loss, and peripheral neuropathy. If......

city, Saxony-Anhalt Land (state), central Germany. It lies at the confluence of the Holtemme and Zillierbach rivers, north of the Harz Mountains and southwest of Magdeburg. First mentioned in 1121 and chartered in 1229, it joined the Hanseatic League in 1267. In 142...

...empire at the time of the colonists’ arrival essentially covered present-day eastern Virginia, extending from the Potomac River to the Great Dismal Swamp, and its capital was at the village of Werowocomoco. Powhatan initially acted ambivalently toward the English settlement, sometimes ordering or permitting attacks against the colonists while at other times trading tribal food for......

river in Germany that rises on the southwestern slopes of the Thüringer Wald (Thuringian Forest), just north of Eisfeld, and flows generally north for 181 miles (290 km) to Münden, where it joins the Fulda River to form the Weser....

town and shire in southern Victoria, Australia, situated on the Werribee River about 19 mi (29 km) southwest by rail from Melbourne and nearly 5 mi from the coast of Port Phillip Bay. Three major government facilities are located at Werribee: The Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works Farm (a sewage farm that experiments with water waste purification methods), the State (agri...

Flemish composer best known to his contemporaries for his madrigals. He was highly praised by contemporary musicians, particularly Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Thomas Morley, and Claudio Monteverdi....

Flemish composer best known to his contemporaries for his madrigals. He was highly praised by contemporary musicians, particularly Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Thomas Morley, and Claudio Monteverdi....

...were unkind to the cowled crime fighter and his sidekick. The challenge came not from a costumed nemesis, however, as the biggest threat facing Batman—indeed, all comics—was psychiatrist Frederic Wertham. In his polemic against the industry, Seduction of the Innocent (1954), Wertham charged that comics morally corrupt their impressionable young readers, impeaching......

Czech-born psychologist, one of the founders, with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, of Gestalt psychology, which attempts to examine psychological phenomena as structural wholes, rather than breaking them down into components....

...perpetual war as well as great economic investments, both entailing excessive strain on state finances. At first the government resorted to rich bankers such as Samuel Oppenheimer and his successor Samson Wertheimer for funds. Soon, however, it attempted to establish state-controlled banking firms. The Banco del Giro, founded in Vienna in 1703, quickly failed, but the Vienna Stadtbanco of 1705....

...is the highly melodic Samson et Dalila (1877). Many of the operas of Jules Massenet, including Manon (1884) and Werther (1892; libretto derived from Goethe’s Leiden des jungen Werthers; “The Sorrows of Young Werther”), were phenomenally popular in their day, as......

Originally known as Caritas, the organization was founded in Germany in 1897 by a young Roman Catholic priest, Lorenz Werthmann, to provide social welfare services to the poor and disadvantaged. Similar groups soon formed in other countries. International coordination efforts led in 1924 to the creation of a regular conference of national Roman Catholic social welfare organizations, which was......

...tomb of his patron, Philip the Bold; and a large Calvary group for the Charterhouse cloisters. When he died in 1406, the continuance of his work was assured by the employment of his nephew and heir, Claus de Werve, until his death in 1439. Further, the pattern of the finally completed tomb of Philip the Bold became famous immediately and was frequently imitated all over Europe....

...network, military armaments (after the abortive attempt on Hitler’s life of July 20, 1944), the Volkssturm (“People’s Storm Troop”), a mass levy of mostly older men, and later the Werwolf, a guerrilla force intended to continue the struggle after the war. He also unsuccessfully commanded two army groups....

most important of the Theravada Buddhist festivals, commemorating the birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha. The event is observed on the full-moon day of the lunar month Vesakha, which falls in April or May. The day is observed as a public holiday in many Southeast Asian countries. It is marked by special devotional services and various deeds intended to be meritorious, such as the presen...

town, North Rhine-Westphalia Land (state), northwestern Germany. It lies along the Rhine and Lippe rivers and the Lippe-Seiten Canal, northwest of the Ruhr. Chartered in 1241, it joined the Hanseatic League in about 1350 and has long been an important trade and shipping point. It was also a traditional district capital and cultural centre of the border area of the lower R...

Renaissance physician who revolutionized the study of biology and the practice of medicine by his careful description of the anatomy of the human body. Basing his observations on dissections he made himself, he wrote and illustrated the first comprehensive textbook of anatomy....

...through the Dortmund–Ems Canal with the German North Sea coast and through the Mittelland Canal with the waterways of central and eastern Germany and eastern Europe; and by the less important Wesel–Datteln–Hamm Canal (1930), which runs parallel to the lower course of the Lippe. The Rhine–Herne Canal’s capacity for craft of 1,350 tons became the standard both for the......

...Kazimierz Wielki (1900; “Casimir the Great”) evoked Polish history and projected it on modern times. Wesele (1901; The Wedding, filmed in 1973 by Andrzej Wajda), his greatest and most popular play, premiered in 1901. Its story was suggested by the actual marriage of the poet Lucjan Rydel to a peasant girl......

...transcendent realities but are instead expressive of human ideals, desires, hopes, attitudes, and intentions. Such thinking goes back to the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity, 1841) in the 19th century. It was promoted in the early 20th century by George Santayana, John Dewey, and J.H. Randall, Jr., and later by Christian writers such as.....

...and the historical-critical approach would achieve this. Harnack defended this position in his most popular book, Das Wesen des Christentums (1900; What Is Christianity?), which was the transcript of a course of lectures he had delivered at the University of Berlin....

...by his discovery of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. The outcome was Tristan und Isolde (1857–59), of which the crystallizing agent was his hopeless love for Mathilde Wesendonk (the wife of a rich patron), which led to separation from his wife, Minna....

...be grasped. In the eidetic reduction, one must forgo everything that is factual and merely occurs in this way or that. A means of grasping the essence is the Wesensschau, the intuition of essences and essential structures. This is not a mysterious kind of intuition. Rather, one forms a multiplicity of variations of what is given, and while......

...and regulated on the basis of traditional social rules. People have simple and direct face-to-face relations with each other that are determined by Wesenwille (natural will)—i.e., natural and spontaneously arising emotions and expressions of sentiment....

major river of western Germany that serves as an important transport artery from Bremerhaven and Bremen. Formed near the city of Münden by the union of its two headstreams—the Fulda and the Werra—the Weser flows 273 miles (440 km) northward through northern Germany to the North Sea. The major tributaries of the Weser are the Aller, Lesum, Ge...

...founded by Hanover in competition in 1845; and Lehe, a borough dating from medieval times that attained town status in 1920. The union of Lehe and Geestemünde in 1924 formed the town of Wesermünde, which in turn absorbed Bremerhaven in 1939, under Hanoverian jurisdiction. This unified city, restored to Bremen in 1947, was thereafter known by the name of Bremerhaven....

May 24, 1932London. Eng.April 12, 2016Brighton, Eng.British playwright who explored the everyday lives of working-class people, particularly as they related to his own Jewish upbringing, and was identified in the late 1950s as one of Britain’s literary Angry Young Men. He...

Irish-born commander of the British army during the Napoleonic Wars and later prime minister of Great Britain (1828–30). He first rose to military prominence in India, won successes in the Peninsular War in Spain (1808–14), and shared in the victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo (1815)....

British statesman and government official. Wellesley, as governor of Madras (now Chennai) and governor-general of Bengal (both 1797–1805), greatly enlarged the British Empire in India and, as lord lieutenant of Ireland (1821–28, 1833–34), attempted to reconcile Protestants and Roman Catholics in a bitter...

composer and organist who helped introduce the music of J.S. Bach into England. The son of Charles Wesley, the hymn writer, and the nephew of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, he began an oratorio, Ruth, at the age of 6 and at age 11 published Eight Lessons for the Harpsichord. Though he suffered from 1787 onward from an injury to his skull, he became one of t...